How you present yourself online via your website is thought about and designed in such a way that it presents information about you around the premise of providing unique and useful information for the online info seeker who type away at some keywords via a search engine. Since such info seekers go online with a predetermined agenda meant to make themselves further equipped with product/service/brand information they couldn’t otherwise source elsewhere, you website pounces on the opportunity to provide info at the get-go, no questions asked. The objective here is to encourage the site visitor to go next to the contact us page right after browsing about info or perhaps hit the buy cart button quick.
The straightforward businesslike personality is what consumers often experience with brands via websites that are hewn along traditional advertising/marketing premises. Whatever clever messages contained in websites however, just sit by probably hinting at perhaps being remembered by site visitors like how well meaning friends do as they watch their buddies fondle, shake and ogle retail items at a store. This is what usually happens moments before online buyers finally decide — to buy or not to buy. This isn’t the kind of online personality that brands behave with on social media. In the first place, the retail cycle affair begins differently: It’s the consumer who initiates the dialog and not the other way around.
Just one of the guys
Once users decide to connect with brands in social media networks, it is likely with the intention of striking up multiple ongoing conversations with them. This is the norm of interactive activities that characterize social media use as people interact with various other people within their online circle of friends. So much so that brands automatically become “one of the guys” you could strike up a conversation with at any given time via the various calls to action open to you like Like, Comment, Share, Tweet, Retweet, Favorite, Reblog, Pin, Connect, and the like — depending on what social media platform you are using at the moment.
Under such a premise, of course, you couldn’t expect your brand to go around social media with the same kind of personality it carries in your website. That would be much too stodgy or stiff for social media use. Engagement requires a friendlier approach that encourages meaningful exchange of shareable content as opposed to directly accessible hard information found in websites (and blogs within company websites).
Friendly neighborhood enabler
Social media pages used by brands need to be capable of generating information first before generating possible sales. That’s why it could only function as a potential conduit to the following:
Provider of link access to website landing pages by way of viral content being posted.
Suggester of information connected to business VoIP systems and other retail telecom.
Source of retail apps for potential use in virtual or augmented reality retail methods.
Social media brand personality thus functions like your friendly neighborhood enabler who graciously shows you the way to get to the nearest store or perhaps gives you a number to call in say, a RingCentral business phone system. However, social media engagement would and could never function as a direct selling tool since the typical social media user decides usually only after getting enough helpful advice from online friends. Social media works among a wide array of audiences because it offers real-time interaction with high entertainment value. Your brands need to evoke that kind of personality: Approachable and very entertaining to be with.
